Artist & Tune
About the Song
This Mike Heron song was recorded by the Incredible String Band (of which Heron was a part with Robin Williamson) on their 1968 album "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter."
The widely known and sung refrain line "May the Long Time Sun Shine Upon You" has been sung with a variety of alterations and is widely misconstrued to be a Sikh hymn or a traditional Celtic chant, but it is definitely composed by Heron.
May the long-time sun shine upon you
All love surround you
And the pure light within you
Guide your way on
G Am / D G / - Am / D G
—words & music by Mike Heron
(c) 1968 Warner-Tamerlane Music Corp. All rights reserved.
Dan Lander described the song in 2010 in the book Music in Transition: From the Beatles to Xanadu as follows: "Weaving between styles as divergent as Bahamian funerary music, East Indian incantation and ancient Celtic mysticism, 'A Very Cellular Song' represents a high point in the band's creativity and surely influenced a host of others including Led Zeppelin, the Who and Lou Reed. Handclaps, kazoo, harpsichord and pipes intermingle and morph into each other. If this sounds like dissonance and chaos, it is. However, it holds together and in the end conveys a powerful range of human emotion through pain and joy and back again."